I’ll look across start line and fear rivals are cheats

Rio Competitor

Andrew Triggs Hodge, Great Britain rower

Monday July 25 2016, 12.01am, The Times

I will be competing in Rio against a Russian crew in the men’s eight and, as it stands this morning, I find it very hard to believe that I will be racing against clean athletes. That crew includes three athletes who were in the men’s quadruple sculls that was disqualified from the Games in July after Sergey Fedorovtsev failed a drugs test.

Those three are either clean or they got away with it. I sympathise with any clean athlete, but in my view, a sophisticated doping system would not have targeted an individual from a boat, it would be more likely to invest something into the whole entity. I am in a position now where I will have to sit on a start line and